Ekaterina
Kudashkina: This week we start with Syria, which is being
rocked by unprecedented anti-governmental protests demanding political and
economic reforms and the resignation of 45-year old President Bashar al-Assad.
We shall then move on to the Caribbean to look at Cuba where the Communist
Party Congress—the first in 14 years—coincided with the 50th anniversary of the
failed Bay of Pigs invasion; finally, we will discuss the story of the U.S.
Marine Private Bradley Manning, still being held in solitary confinement in
Quantico, Virginia.

In our first heading, Beyond the Headlines, we will take a look at the ongoing mass
protests that have gripped Syria’s major cities with violent clashes and this
week, thousands demanding resignation of President Bashar al-Assad. They
started as minor riots in the south of the country, in Deraa, when schoolkids
came out into streets demanding more freedom as they saw in Tunisia and Egypt.
But then the police overreacted, they took them to police departments and they
jailed them for several hours, and then their relatives stepped in. More than a
month after first protests broke out in Deraa, after the first blood was
spilled in the clashes with police and unknown snipers, Syria and its leader
find themselves at a crossroads.

Sergei
Strokan: I have a feeling that for Syria and President
Assad this is more than just standing at a crossroads. The situation is very
dangerous in many ways. If ethnic and religious strife continues, Syria’s
sovereignty can be jeopardized. As
for Bashar Assad, it is a moment of truth for him. He has to decide whether he
would act as a classical old dictator in the region, or like a strong,
forward-looking leader who is not scared of bold reforms

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: Two weeks ago there was a congress in which Assad
announced changes, but the package of reforms has not been confirmed by the
government. Assad invited a team of Western experts to help him with the
economic reforms, so there have been some economic reforms, but there have been
no political reforms.

Mira
Salganik: I have a feeling that the president does not
have the guts to go into real changes.

Sergei
Strokan: I think this is a very complicated question. This
is not only a question of guts, but what kind of legacy does Assad want to
leave. He is at a crossroads—either he will go into history as an old dictator,
as his father, or he will introduce changes. If it works, he can reinvent
himself as the leader of a new democratic Syria. That is the legacy I am
talking about. Mira, do you remember, how he became president 11 years ago? It
was a very lively episode of Syrian politics.

Mira
Salganik: He was a young student, good looking, a nice
boy, studying ophthalmology in London, not even thinking of a political career.
Then Hafez Assad passes away, the ophthalmologist was quickly brought back to
his homeland, and in a matter of days he emerged as a full-fledged president.

Sergei
Strokan: He had a very limited number of options from the
very start. This is not a question of his guts or decisiveness. When you are
surrounded with the old apparatus of your father and you are driven by the
inertia of old political traditions, how can you act? At the same time he
understands the need for change.Just
a couple of quotes to illustrate this point: "The world is rapidly
changing around us and we have to keep up with developments;” and: "We
have to focus on the demands and the aspirations of the people or there will be
a sense of anger."

Mira
Salganik: Some experts say that Syria these days is
turning into a battleground between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia.
Bashar’s father, Hafez Assad brutally crushed Sunni Muslim extremists in 1982. Maybe
the Sunnis now want to take revenge.

Sergei
Strokan: That is very interesting background, but when we
speak about conspiracy theories, it should not be restricted to the struggle
between Shias and Sunnis. This week, the Washington Post reported that,
according to newly released WikiLeaks cables, the State Department has been
secretly financing Syrian opposition groups for at least
five years.

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: I have seen that story. It says that U.S. aid
continued flowing into the hands of the Syrian opposition even after President
Obama began his reengagement policy with the Syrian government.

Mira
Salganik: You might say that Bashar Assad in his mistrust
of the West and foreign influences does have a point, but you can’t simply
write off the disconnect of the Syrian people and all that is going on in
Damascus as the result of foreign influence alone. We do live in an interconnected
world, but each one of us has the right to commit his own blunders.

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: We always need to be careful when we try to
analyze the situation but of course no conspiracy would ever have worked if it
were ungrounded, and the ground is there. Anyway, the question is – just how
much time is left for Mr. Assad? Here is Dr. Murhaf Jouejati, professor of political science and
international affairs at George Washington University and professor at the
National Defense University’s Near East South Asia Center for Strategic
Studies.

With all that is going on in Syria now, we can
still see some basic differences from other regimes because Mr. Assad is a
young person, he is rather popular with his electorate, and he is introducing
some reforms. How do you think the situation could develop?

Murhaf
Jouejati: He has made a lot of concessions to the protestors. Some of
these concessions are, from the prospective of the protestors, insignificant—like
the shuffling of the cabinet—others are more significant—like the lifting of
the emergency laws—but in the end, Mr. Assad has not met the demands of the
protestors. There has not yet been the establishment of political parties, so
we are still in a situation of a stalemate and a crisis.

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: Do you think he will have time to introduce more
changes closer towards the Congress of his party?

Murhaf
Jouejati: Well, the more time that elapses without any concessions to the
protestors and the more force is used against the protestors, the less chances
that he will have success. Again, the use of violence against armed protestors
is angering everyone, domestically and internationally.

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: So what is your forecast: Is he going to go, or
could he still remain in power?

Murhaf
Jouejati: I think he still has some room to maneuver, but this window of
opportunity is closing very quickly.

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: So what would you suggest he do in this
situation?

Murhaf
Jouejati: I think he has to immediately make public trials for those
officers who have used force against the protestors. He has to show that he is
truly serious about combating corruption—not merely through speeches, but with
actual actions. In other words, he has to take significant steps to show that
he is truly is a reformer and not simply an authoritarian leader.

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: Is there a lot of opposition to the reforms
within the ruling elite?

Murhaf
Jouejati: The ruling elite is very comfortable with this status quo, and
the deeper the reforms, the more the elite is going to be alienated, so this is
truly a push and pull between the ruling elite and the protestors.

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: Which means that Mr. Assad is in a lose-lose
situation, so to say?

Murhaf
Jouejati: Not necessarily, because as you pointed out earlier he still has
some support and he needs to develop that support, he needs to balance things out,
develop enough reforms to satisfy the crowd, and yet not give up the entire
house so as not to lose the ruling elite.

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: Supposing Mr. Assad still has to go, who could take
his place?

Murhaf
Jouejati: There is going to be a power vacuum, and this could unleash a
power struggle within the elite and within society. In his absence, there is
going to be more chaos.

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: Assad is always speaking about some external
factors in this situation. How strong is the influence of external factors?

Murhaf
Jouejati: Well, there might be an external hand, but certainly most of the
unrest is domestic. For the past 43 years, Syrians have been kept under martial
law, also they have taken into account what is going on regionally, so this is
a new era, it is a time of change, that the Syrian population has seized upon
it.

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: So, the situation is dire, but there is still a
way out if Mr. Assad has enough courage to move rapidly and to oppose those who
are against the reforms?

Murhaf
Jouejati: Yes, I think that is correct. The situation is dire. He still
has a window of opportunity, but a window that is closing very rapidly.

Ekaterina Kudashkina: Now we
turn to Red Line’s second heading Between
the Lines where we usually discuss the most interesting and thought
provoking publication of the week. Since one of the most notable events of the
week is the Sixth Communist Party Congress in Cuba—the first Party forum in 14
years and the first Congress held since Fidel Castro stepped down as Cuba’s
leader, we have chosen for discussion Carlos Alberto Montaner’s piece
carried in the Miami Herald entitled “Cuban Communists Headed for Oblivion.” Is
Cuba’s present system heading for oblivion or a new lease on life or perhaps
something else?

Sergei
Strokan: I have noticed that speaking at the forum, Cuban
leader Raul Castro was unusually frank. He openly said that his country’s
economy is “on the brink of a precipice” and proposed a number of truly
revolutionary changes. Raul Castro who is 80, proposed a 10-year term limit for
Cuba’s highest officials – in the realities of Cuban socialism this is
something shockingly new.

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: Perhaps the ruling elite, despite their ages, are
still aware of the need of reform, which is very important.

Sergei
Strokan: That was not the only change. Among the urgent
steps Castro suggested for rescuing the economy were: expanding possibilities
for private enterprise, lifting bans on buying property and new cars as well as
cancellation of food rationing. As things stand now, Cubans are allowed only to
trade property of equal worth, and new cars are allocated by authorities – not
bought.

Mira
Salganik: Cuba by all accounts is in need of reforms. As
Montaner writes in The Miami Herald “after 52 years of dictatorship, without a
hostile parliament or an opposition that could hinder the government’s work,
the six basic elements that determine the quality of life of any modern society
have decayed into nightmares: food, potable water, housing, electricity,
communications and transport.” The question is how to reform and who is to do
the reforming?

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: This story to me seems a little bit tragic because
it was written by an emigrant. Of course there are a lot of problems, but maybe
not as grim as he tries to depict. Cuba has been seen as a potential market by
many global players and they have started to develop tourism there.

Unlike in Syria, here the main question is who will start the reforms.

Sergei
Strokan: What about Marino Murillo? Will he succeed?
Murillo is called Raul’s “ideological stepson”, and Raul wants to build
socialism without subsidies and capitalism without markets.

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: The 50-year-old economist, former Army officer
and former Minister of the Economy is said to owe total allegiance to the
general-president and to be committed to retaining the basic elements of the
communist system, although eliminating paternalism.

I think there are two major scenarios of the
transfer from planned socialist economics to something more liberal; one is our
perestroika and the second one is the Chinese model, so it is up to the Cubans
which they will choose.

We are now joined by Vitaly Makarov, the former Head of the Cuba section at the
international department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union.

Vitaly
Makarov: This is probably the most difficult question. They
are not turning away from the ideas of socialism. Political power belongs to
the Communist Party, whereas the economy is evolving on the basis of market
principles. This is probably what the Cubans are striving for. But they have
encountered some difficulties. The situation in Cuba is that it’s not only domestic
factors that play an important role—there are external factors, such as the
ongoing economic blockade of Cuba.

One other thing that seems paramount to me. I
thought that along with Raul, there would be a team of young leaders coming to
power, but this didn’t happen.

I think that the most important thing ahead for
Cuba is moving out of a plane of a resistance between socialism and capitalism
to aligning themselves to a new center of political influence in the world.
Before, the beacon was the so-called “socialist camp”, whereas now there are
lots to choose from: the triad of U.S., Canada and Mexico; there’s China,
there’s Europe, there’s the Asian countries and also the Latin American
countries, of which Cuba is a part. Plus there’s the new configuration of
BRICS, which I think has a promising future. Cuba needs to choose.

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: And now we move on to our third heading –
the Man in the News. And I
suppose this time there are two men in the news – the U.S. Army private Bradley
Manning and the U.S. President Barak Obama.

Sergei
Strokan: It seems that in order to win another
presidential term, Obama will have to reinvent himself and reignite his
base. As I see it, in an uphill battle for presidency every soldier would
matter for him, including Private Bradley Manning.

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: Well, just to remind our listeners—since July,
Manning has been kept at the Marine Corps brig in
Quantico in conditions that have become a subject of
growing alarm both in the U.S. and in other countries. The controversy over U.S.
Army Private Bradley Manning, suspected of giving classified material to
WikiLeaks, which was initially seen as a purely U.S. domestic story, is rapidly
growing up into a large-scale international scandal.

Mira
Salganik: The scandal is not only raising uneasy questions within the U.S.,
but is also putting the Obama administration at odds with some of its key
European allies.

Sergei
Strokan: Moreover, it casts a long shadow over
Washington’s efforts to champion a global drive for peace and democracy, as
well as to advise other nations – from China and Russia to Iran and Myanmar on
how to safeguard basic freedoms and human rights.

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: Some may argue that Manning is a traitor who has
presumably downloaded to WikiLeaks some 250,000 sensitive State Department and
Pentagon cables on the U.S. operation in Iraq. His move in fact hurt the U.S.
international standing, undermining national security. However, the question
whether Bradley is “a soldier or a traitor” is yet to be answered. Personally I
have answered to myself, he is a traitor to me. But the conditions of his
containment in Quantico have already become a matter of concern.

Sergei
Strokan: In an open letter, scholars stated that
Manning’s treatment "violates his person and his liberty without due
process of law and in a way it administers cruel and unusual punishment of a
sort that cannot be constitutionally inflicted even upon someone convicted of
terrible offenses, not to mention someone merely accused of such offenses."

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: Even if he is a traitor he shouldn’t be treated
like a dog.

Sergei
Strokan: It seems that today the enthusiasm over Obama
has largely evaporated. In a letter to President Obama, the human rights
committee of the German parliament called the conditions of Bradley Manning’s
detention "unnecessarily hard and having a penalizing character." Weeks
after Barack Obama has officially announced his participation in the 2012
presidential campaign, more and more people both in the U.S. and in the world
are asking: “Who is Mr. Obama? Is he the same person we voted for and supported
in 2008 and after?” “What if everything we think we know about the
president's political position is wrong?” -- writes Peggy Noonan in the Wall
Street Journal. Mind you, the story is not about Manning, but about Obama’s
domestic and international failures: the failure to close Guantanamo,
Afghanistan and Libya are among them.

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: Anyway, my question is who is Private Manning? Is he a traitor,
or a whistleblower? Our next guest speaker is Joe Glanville, an editor with the Index on Censorship, a
London-based organization that has voiced its support for Julian Assange.

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: Do you see Mr. Manning as a traitor the way he
is described in the United States or perhaps he is someone who wants to serve
the truth?

Joe
Glanville: What label you give him depends on where you are sitting. As far
as the government is concerned, he is a traitor, but as far as he is concerned,
he is a whistleblower. He came across information that he felt was in the
public interest and he needed to leak.

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: Whether the investigation manages to confirm
that he was a whistleblower or perhaps not, do you think that the way he is
kept in his solitary confinement is a violation of human rights?

Joe
Glanville: Of course it is a violation of human rights and I believe now
that he is being moved to a prison with much better conditions. It has been a
matter of great concern for human rights organizations that he is being treated
very, very, very severely and clearly the administration wanted to punish him.

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: Do you think that it is a natural reaction of
the Department of Defense towards someone they believe is a traitor, or is it
still a fault of the current US administration?

Joe
Glanville: I think it is always the case, that when anyone leaks
confidential government information they are always treated very harshly. It is
always a great concern for us, because most of the time information that is
being leaked is very clearly in the public interest, but as far as the
government is concerned, these are bad documents that they want to keep
secret. Always in my experience they act extremely harshly, to make an example
of whistle-blowers.

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: What we are witnessing is some kind of dilemma.
It is always a question whether a person should act in the pubic interest or
should he ignore facts that actually harm the society but protecting the
interest of the government.

Joe
Glanville: Probably the solution is that there has to be a recognition that
some information that is leaked, even if it is leaked without the approval of a
corperation or a government, can be in the public interest, and there is a
justification for the leaking of the information. I do not think that the
leaking of information per se should mean that somebody is prosecuted and
certainly never treated in a way that Bradley Manning has been treated.

Ekaterina
Kudashkina: Do you think that it really makes a difference
whether a person is paid for the information or not?

Joe
Glanville: I think it depends on the circumstances. I think in most cases
whistle-blowers do not tend to be paid, they do it as a matter of conscience,
or of great ethical concern, but I think that it just depends on the context.